Blackwell Reference Online

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Comparable to Renaissance painting in the early study of European art history, the painting of the Song dynasty (960–1279) in China featured prominently in the establishment of the discipline of Chinese art history. In America after World War II, scholars of Chinese art, as the first and the second generations in a field that had recently come onto the academic scene, acknowledged that Song painting played a central role in the later history of Chinese painting, which extended from the tenth to the twentieth century. This history is dominated by scroll and album paintings, formats easier to circulate than those of mural and screen paintings of previous dynasties, thereby aiding in the formation of a complicated networking of artistic styles and a rich tradition of artistic discourses. For the past millennium, with a gamut of styles that influenced many different painting schools in later periods, Song painting has been considered the origin of the trajectory of Chinese painting to which later painters and critics recurrently referred. Song painting did not assume its canonical and seminal status in Chinese painting history exclusively by the discursive power of the modern disciplinary field of art history. In fact, two historical periods marked watershed moments at which Song painting became the center of the artistic discourse that engaged cultural elites, steered the direction ... log in or subscribe to read full text